FAQ For the feedHopper iPad app. Is your question not here, or not clear enough for you? Post a comment with your question and we will expand the FAQ.

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A site offers both Atom and RSS. Which one should I use?

The answer depends 🙂 It is not uncommon to see Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 both offered for a particular website. The content is intended to be identical, but more often than not you may come across a site that offers a richer experience (such as embedded images) in one over the other. As both standards are relatively similar to an end-user, there is typically no rhyme or reason for this distinction, therefore there is no benefit to always picking one over the other. Sample both and keep the one that has more content.

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What feeds can feedHoppper read?

feedHopper can read Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0, RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. There are always bugs, so if you have a feed you think should work but it does not let us know.

There are also various optional feature sets that get added to standards over time. If you want to see something added, let us know.

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Articles are sometimes cut short

Sometimes websites choose to limit the length of an article they post over RSS/Atom. Since this is frequently automated, the cut-off of an article often does not make logical sense to a reader. Typically this length limit is website-dependent, hence we recommend you try emailing the site to request they expand the cut-off. When experiencing truncated articles, you can read the full article by simply touching the weblink button at the lower right of the display.

feedHopper has a unique feature that you can enable on a per-feed basis to resolve this. It will slow downloading a bit, but you will have a richer experience. We only recommend this for feeds that do not already provide full content.

To enable this, edit the feed settings, and under "RSS Content", turn on "Create Full Text Articles".

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How do I share my item list with another feedHopper or Flitter! user?

First, enter settings (on the main list, touch the gear on the lower right). Then select "Export". Now in the following screen, select "Export as Email". This will bring up an email dialog with a special attachment added by feedHopper. Enter the email addresses of the folks you want to share with and hit send.

Thats it! The email contains instructions for them.

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I entered my feed URL, but there are no articles or feedHop complains

It is possible (nay, likely) that there are feeds out there that contain some unexpected content fields Flitter! was not designed to make use of. If you have an RSS or ATOM feed that you want supported but has issues, please post details in the forum and we will attempt to address the defect.

Also, we are limited to the supported codex provided by Apple. You can use a third party website to auto-convert into a known format . This trick has worked for other customers:

http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss

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I received an Email from a feedHopper or Flitter! user. How do I import the feed list?

First, in the email program on your iPhone or iPad, open the attachment by touching it. You should now be looking at a lot of crazy XML text. Just select all of the contents and copy them to the clipboard (touch and hold over some text until the magnifying loupe appears and then let up. Next, touch "select all" followed by "copy".

Exit Email and enter feedHopper. In feedHopper, select the "Add" button and the "Add From Clipboard" option from the resulting menu. The feeds and web bookmarks will be extracted and displayed. Note that only items you don't already have will e shown.

Pick and choose the items you want from the list and touch "save".

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How do I sync with Google Reader?

Under settings (touch the 'gear' icon), a dialog window comes up with setting options along the left and the currently selected setting's features on the right.

Touch the Google logo (G) on the left and the google sync options will appear on the right. Here, set Enable Sync to ON, and enter your google login credentials. Close the dialog.

At this point, syncing is active. You will be able to share/like/star articles, and the article read state is kept in line with Google Reader. Now all that is left is to import the desired feeds from Google that you want to read on your iPad. Read the FAQ on importing from Google Reader.

How can I import feeds from Google Reader?

Next, under the "+" button, select "Import from Google Reader". Here, you may check-to-add all the feeds from your Google Reader account you want synced on feedHopper.

If you add the feeds using another mechanism, they are still sync'ed. So don't worry about that. This import tool is just an easy way to access your Google Account's feed list.

You may have feeds in feedHopper that are NOT subscribed by your Google Reader, and you may have feeds subscribed by Google Reader NOT in feedHopper. This way, you can customize your feedHopper experience.

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How do I import from Google Reader without enabling Google Sync?

First, in Google Reader, select settings in the upper right of the web page near your account name. On the settings page, locate and select "import/export". Here, find and select "Export your subscriptions as an OPML file". This will download the file "google_reader_subscriptions.xml".

You can import the file's contents into feedHopper two ways:
1) Email it to yourself and follow the instructions for importing from the clipboard.
2) Place the file on a web-enabled server and point feedHopper at it by using the import from server feature.

Both of these options have FAQ answers here for more information.

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How do I import feeds from a file on a server?

You can share feeds over the network by placing the OPML xml file anywhere on a site accessible to the iPad. In feedHopper, select the "Add" button and "Import From Server".

On this import page, just enter the URL of the file and touch "go". We have shared a file on dyerware for you to try out using this mechanism:
www.dyerware.com/flitter_opml.xml

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feedHopper takes too long to download articles. Can I speed it up?

Most of the time spent during a refresh is in network delays. You can reduce the amount of data feedHopper will pull by turning off thumbnails in the settings menu. Even with thumbnails off you will still get thumbnails on some feeds (such as the New York Times) if feedHopper is able to identify that the image is small.

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I want to suggest a feed I like for the feed discovery mechanism in feedHopper. How do I do that?

Just post your feeds in the support forum. You can even send us your exported feed list if you want. We can update the database here on the site without releasing a new feedHopper version.

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I get a strange "Content error at site" or other message on one or more feeds during a refresh.

At times sites may undergo maintenance, or include a post with illegal XML characters, or terminate the network connection due to heavy loads. Twitter is an example of a site that occasionally gets overloaded and stops responding.

If you repeatedly get a connection error it is possible the feed URL has changed. Another possibility is the encoding format is not understood by the iPad.

If you are getting an error and need help with it, feel free to contact us about it.

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Can I listen to podcasts offline?

Yes. Edit your Feed's settings and select the Podcast category. Here, turn off streaming mode. Now, the first time you play a podcast, the file will be downloaded into your article. It will now play offline for as long as you keep the article.

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My podcast does not play. Is there something I can do?

Most podcasts are compatible with feedHopper, as long as quicktime is happy with them. That is, as long as Apple iOS can decode the stream. If you are having compatibility problems try turning streaming off. Many podcasts are not streamable and this works the vast majority of the time: Edit our feed settings and select the Podcast category. Here, turn the "Streaming mode" setting to Off.

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17 Responses to “feedHopper FAQ”

Hello, I’d like to know if your soft can solve a need of mine. I sign a newspaper in web, and like to download all the news to my Ipad to read it later.
The index of the news appear, everyday, in a url like this.http://www.newssite.com.br/news/new
All the links of the news I’d like to read are in this URL.
Then I click in the first link, autenticate with my login and password (only one time a day is needed), and view the first new.
I’d like a program that can download all the links and contents of the links, for offline reading, in the news day link.
Then I ask, your soft has this feature?
Max

If by sign-in, you mean an account, feedhopper supports URL authentification for feeds (except when used with google sync feature). you configure the feed’s credentials in a settings panel.

I tried visiting that site and the link does not work. I peeked at http://www.newssite.com but saw no login or account information. There is a feed, but it looks unused.

If you are asking if feedhopper will aggregate a regular website based on content layout, no not really. There are some web services that you can “teach” how to break down a webpage to create an RSS feed (then of course you can use feedhopper). I can dig those up for you if you want to try them.

I’d like to download all the text (news) from that page, so I can read it later.

That site (www.folha.com.br), is from one of the biggest newspaper here in Brasil, and have an RSS feature, but the RSS gives you the latest news, and I’d like to pick up the news of the printed newspaper of the day, that you grab in this link, http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/indices/

If you think this topic is not interesting for everybody and like to continue with it, please, private mail me.

Hi, i bought feedhopper for iPad yesterday and set it up with my faforite feeds. Everything worked fine except for the all feed dates being 1.1.1970. Today
I refreshed and didn’t get any new articles :-(( Any glue what is going wrong here?

I emailed you but wanted to follow up here as well: Sorry you are having any problems. Please email us the feed(s) that are exhibiting this problem and we will get a fix right out! its just support-at-dyerware-dot-com

Also, anyone having problems please feel free to contact us at any time by forum or email.

Hi, I enjoyed using feedHopper app. There’s something problem, though. I set one of the feed passcode lockout. When I access that feed, of course feedHopper asks Passcode. Then without entering passdcode, I rotate iPad, and automatically unlocked.
Thank you for your investigation.

Hello,
I’ve been searching for a feed reader for the iPad that will download the enclosures (podcasts) for the feeds I read. Will feed hopper do this? I want to be able to listen to the enclosures in the car without an active Internet connection.

Yes Bryan. When creating or editing a feed, use https in the URL, and then under the Advanced section, enter your user and password. You can have as many protected feeds as you want 🙂 You can also have a user/pass for podcasts be different than the RSS feed (in case the two are separate).

Please post a bug report in the forum if this is not working for you and we will get right on it.